Sandia storing information securely in DNA

Sandia National Laboratories bioengineers Marlene and George Bachand show off their new method for encrypting and storing information in DNA. Digital data storage degrades and can become obsolete and old-school books and paper require lots of space. (Photo by Lonnie Anderson)

Experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider generate 15 million gigabytes of data per year. That is a lot of digital data to inscribe on hard drives or beam up to the “cloud.”

Digital data storage degrades and can become obsolete and old-school books and paper require lots of space. Compared to digital and analog information storage, DNA is more compact and durable and never becomes obsolete. Readable DNA was extracted from the 600,000-year-old remains of a horse found in the Yukon.

Bachand was inspired by the recording of all of Shakespeare’s sonnets into 2.5 million base pairs of DNA — about half the genome of the tiny E. coli bacterium. Using this method, the group at the European Bioinformatics Institute could theoretically store 2.2 petabytes of information — 200 times the printed material in the Library of Congress — in one gram of DNA.

The Latest on: DNA information storage

December 7, 2016 - Sophia Genetics, global leader in Data-Driven Medicine, unveiled today a new privacy-protecting technology for the storage and access to patients' genomic information worldwide, paving the way to a new industry standard. The largest clinical genomics ...

December 5, 2016 - The startup began three years ago as a cloud-based platform for genomics analysis called InsideDNA Research, which brought optimized storage and reproducible research to scientists through cloud computing. But it soon saw a broader problem in the ...

December 5, 2016 - DNA sequencing just over a decade ago was an extremely expensive proposition costing approximately $3 billion dollars. Today, DNA sequencing, done mostly by San Diego-based company Illumina, has become a critical part of healthcare technology.

December 1, 2016 - It stands to reason, then, that each human cell potentially holds up to 6.4 billion bits (740MB) of information. Genetic computers, however, would not be limited to high-density data storage because DNA can also be manipulated to create structures in a ...

November 15, 2016 - Other chemicals hold the base pairs in place, and serve other functions in the DNA molecule, but most of the information is stored as a sequence of base pairs. DNA's geometry is a double spiral, with base pairs held between two long strands. For the ...

October 25, 2016 - This recent data-to-DNA conversion, completed in July, totaled 200 megabytes—which would barely register on a 16-gigabyte iPhone. It's not a huge amount of information, but it bested the previous DNA storage record, set by scientists at Harvard ...

October 21, 2016 - The idea of storing digital data in DNA seems like science fiction. At first glance, it might not seem obvious that a molecule can store data. The term “data storage” conjures up images of physical artifacts like CDs and data centers, not a microscopic ...

August 31, 2016 - True, DNA storage would be pathetically slow compared with the microsecond timescales for reading or writing bits in a silicon memory chip. It would take hours to encode data by synthesizing DNA strings with a specific pattern of bases, and still more ...

July 7, 2016 - DNA is a good storage medium because data can be written into molecules more densely than the basic elements of conventional storage technologies can pack it in, says Karin Strauss, Microsoft's lead researcher on the project, which also involves ...

Energy hybrid

December 9, 2016 - To support the development of microgrids in south-east Asia, Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is leading the renewable energy integration demonstrator — Singapore (Reids) project. When fully constructed Reids will be the largest ...

December 2, 2016 - "In a developed market, you are competing with cheaper forms of conventional power generation, such as gas and also hydro. Energy storage costs still have some way to come down for a hybrid plant like Kennedy Energy Park to be competitive," he said.

December 1, 2016 - SEATTLE - When firefighter paramedics Morlon Malveaux and Mark Pedeferri learned that their powerhorse diesel ambulance was going to be traded for a gas-powered hybrid they were more than a little concerned. The two, who run a Medic One rig ...